Leveraging Open Source for Your UI at EE Live!

Using open source can greatly improve the quality of your UI at considerably cheaper cost. Come to EELive! to learn how.

When designing custom systems for the general public, you need to pay special attention to the user interface. With modern mobile devices being so sleek and responsive, a simple interface may seem extremely unfinished by comparison.

The BeagleBone Black

Anton Venediktov has tackled this very issue in his work as an electrical engineer at SoleNet, an electronic design and engineering services consultancy headquartered in Gaithersburg, Md. The company's approach is to leverage open source in every way possible, from hardware to software.

Venediktov, who is conducting a port-mortem for the Classic Post-Mortem track at the Embedded Systems Conference, will discuss issues with an open-source project where his team quickly integrated an advanced UI for a military communication system. The hardware used was the BeagleBone, a powerful open-source development platform; the software that brings a nice, polished user interface to the hardware was mainly Angstrom Linux and Python, both open source.

The classic post-mortem is an exercise done at the end of a project that chronicles in technical detail the design and development of a noteworthy embedded systems application, including a detailed discussion of the tradeoffs and choices made (and why) during the design process.

Although you're probably aware that open source is obviously cheap, or rather, free, you might not know that, when it comes to graphics, many open-source systems have contributors that just might have a better sense of design than engineers putting together a UI. At least, they're better when you factor in the fact that hiring a graphic designer would cost considerably more.